Gertrude Selma Sober
American geologist and mining company executive
Gertrude Selma Sober Field (December 26, 1869 — November 2, 1949) was an American geologist and mining company executive, credited with discovering the zinc in the Arbuckle Mountains in Oklahoma. She was called "Queen of the Arbuckles", and inducted posthumously into the National Mining Hall of Fame in 1988.
Early life and education
Gertrude Selma Sober was born near Farragut, Iowa, the daughter of Morris Smith Sober and Isabel Rebecca Beaston Sober. At age 19, she moved with her family to Oklahoma City, as part of the Land Rush of 1889.
Career
Sober worked as a stenographer and teacher in Oklahoma, but she experimented with raising crops, and enjoyed searching for minerals in her free time. She began raising money for a mining company in 1906, and was called by one Oklahoma newspaper a "noted mineralogist and geologist" as early as 1907. She was prospecting with a local doctor, R. C. Hope, in 1909 when she discovered zinc, and what became the Southwest Davis Zinc Field, a major deposit in Oklahoma. She and Hope formed the short-lived Indian Mining and Development Company, with Sober as president. In the 1910s she invested in the Bellah zinc mine in Arkansas, and was superintendent of the mine.
Late in life, Sober ran a rooming house for students in Norman, Oklahoma, and took up studies at the University of Oklahoma.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gertrude Selma Sober” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.